Text size:

Mets' real problem lies with Minaya

Wallace Matthews

June 24, 2008

Come to think of it, maybe the Mets did Willie Randolph a favor last Tuesday morning in Anaheim. After their non-performance Monday night against the hopeless Seattle Mariners, that midnight assassination is looking more and more like euthanasia.

I mean, nobody could win with this roster, not Randolph, not Gil Hodges, not Joe Torre nor Casey Stengel. Good luck, Jerry Manuel, you are going to need it.

At least Randolph goes home with some lovely parting gifts -- $3.5 million in Wilpon money -- while Jerry Manuel now has to deal with the nightly frustration of trying to win with this team. Monday night, everything was set up for a triumphant homecoming, a second home opener if you will, a fresh start to a season that rapidly had grown stale.

The Mets were coming off a good road trip, facing a bad team -- the Seattle Mariners were 23 games under .500, 191/2 games out of first place, 5-14 in June and, like the Mets, less than one week into the tenure of an interim manager, Jim Riggleman. The Mets had their ace, Johan Santana, on the mound and new life in their bats and in their clubhouse. Or so I've been reading in the papers.

Wallace Matthews E-mail | Recent columns

So what do they do? They go out and sleepwalk for eight innings and then try to mount a ninth-inning rally that predictably falls short with two runners on base and the bat on Damion Easley's shoulder as a game-ending third strike crosses the plate. Sound familiar?

To call the Mets, 5-2 losers to the Mariners, underachievers would be an insult to the world's true underachievers. These Mets are non-achievers.

For that, you can't blame Willie and although you will be tempted to, you can't blame Manuel, either. The new manager's record now stands at three up, three down, just like his team for five of the nine innings Monday night.

You can't even blame Jeff Wilpon, who despite his worst instincts is coming off like an angel of mercy in the Randolph killing.

But you can blame Omar Minaya, who took Fred Wilpon's checkbook and bought a lot of junk, and of course, you can blame old man Wilpon himself, who continues to think Minaya did a good job.

"Everybody who makes decisions, they're not going to be all right decisions," Wilpon said Monday. "He's made some great decisions."

Presumably he's not including Carlos Delgado, Moises Alou, Pedro Martinez and two years for the dear departed Julio Franco, among other strokes of genius. One move which did appear good at the time was his trade for Santana. Now, having gotten seven wins, six losses and a 9-7 record in the games Santana has started, seven years at $137.5 million is looking like an awfully long time and an awful lot of money.

He is still a good pitcher, but I would bet my last 137.5 cents he is no longer the pitcher the Mets thought he was going to be when they made the deal back in January.

Monday night, Santana was officially credited with seven innings pitched, seven hits and just one earned run, the most misleading line since Don Imus claimed he was actually defending Pacman Jones.

All you need to know about Santana's night is this: In the second inning, with two outs and the bases loaded, thanks to David Wright's error that should have ended the inning, he grooved a first-pitch fastball that Felix Hernandez -- an American League pitcher with eight career at-bats! -- positively crushed over the right-centerfield fence. Grand salami -- and baloney to anyone who thinks the Mets came back from the West Coast a better team minus Randolph.

Clearly, the problem was not in the manager's office, but in the clubhouse. And there it remains.

From an ace who can't retire a pitcher who never hits, to a lineup that seems to lie dead waiting for someone, anyone other than the guy who is batting, to wake them up, the Mets remain an unmanageable mess.

Manuel has done his best to inject his own brand of Jerry Ball on the Mets. Even the somnambulant Carlos Beltran stole a base -- on the first pitch, no less -- in the fifth inning, then went gangsta on Hernandez, sliding in hard and taking the sensational righthander out of the game at a time when it seemed it would benefit the Mets greatly to be rid of him.

But until the ninth inning, they managed just an infield single by Reyes and Beltran's ringing double off the wall.

"We still haven't identified what kind of team we are offensively yet," Manuel said before the game.

But the Mets have defined what kind of team they are overall: aging, jaded and way too comfortable in their mediocrity.

Taking Randolph out of that mix won't change anything but Randolph's state of mind. Now, he can sit home, collect his severance pay, and thank the baseball gods that the problems at Shea Stadium are no longer his.